Data visualizations are an effective way to communicate, analyze, and understand a large amount of data (sometimes “big data”). Data visualization applications enable a user to understand a data set visually, including distribution, trends, outliers, and other factors that are important to making business decisions. Some data sets are very large or complex, and many data sets contain raw, unformatted data that cannot be used in a meaningful way in data visualizations without further processing.
Some applications allow users to build and execute numerous complex calculations or design and build external programs for formatting raw data. Building calculations and external programs typically requires additional training. Even after this additional training, users often produce calculations and external programs that contain syntax errors or are otherwise unable to properly prepare raw data for use in data visualizations.